Google Doodle
It's that time again! Students in grades K-12 are invited to use crayons, clay, graphic design, food, and more to bring to life what inspires them for the annual Google Doodle contest. The prizes are amazing: a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology package for the student's school, and more. The contest closes March 2, 2018. Google provides teacher guides for Grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Share the contest with your students and let the doodling begin!
Epic Books
With 50 shiny, new Chromebooks on each elementary campus, it's a great time to check out Epic Books. (A great big thank you to the Alkek first grade teacher who put this great resource back on my radar!)
Epic provides over 25,000 free ebooks, learning videos, quizzes, and more for educators and librarians. Epic's tutorials provide videos to help teachers get started, log students in, build quizzes, maintain badges, avatars, and reading logs, etc.
Books can be searched by reader's age (0-12), lexile measure, AR level, and genre. Teachers can build collections or "favorite" a pre-built collection. Many books have a "read to me" feature.
Looking for non-fiction support for a unit you're teaching? Need some fresh books for tier time or stations in your classroom? Have a student who has read every shark book in your school library and is looking for more? Epic may have just what you are looking for!
The 86 second video below is geared toward parents (a paid version), but it gives a good overview of the site.
Digital Skills for Teachers
Wow! What a difference a year makes! Last January our campus technology integration time was spent learning Gmail, learning how to manage our professional lives using a Chromebook and Google Drive, and unlocking the potential of the new document cameras and tv's in our classrooms.
Fast forward twelve short months and student Google Classroom dashboards are filled with tiles for their classes. Teachers are filling those online classrooms with quality digital material, teacher-made tutorial videos, and links to interactive quizzes and content. Our students AND our teachers are engaging in 21st century digital skills.
As we move forward these next twelve months, take a few minutes to check out this graphic from Educational Technology and Mobile Learning to see how far you've come in the last twelve months and to set a goal to integrate a new tool or two in the months to come.
(Thanks to the AES teacher who shared this link.)
